For quite some time it has been difficult to point out which was the first video game, mainly due to the multiple definitions of it that have been established, but Nought and crosses, also called OXO, developed by Alexander S. Douglas in 1952. The game was a computerized version of tic tac toe that ran on top of the EDSAC and allowed a human player to play against the machine.
In 1958 William Higginbotham created, using a program for the calculation of trajectories and an oscilloscope, Tennis for Two (tennis for two): a table tennis simulator for the entertainment of visitors to the Brookhaven National Laboratory exhibition.
This video game was the first to allow play between two human players. Four years later Steve Russell, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spent six months creating a computer game using vector graphics: Spacewar.
In this game, two players controlled the direction and speed of two spaceships that were fighting each other. The video game worked on a PDP-1 and was the first to have some success, although it was barely known outside of the university environment.
In 1966 Ralph Baer began to develop, together with Albert Maricon and Ted Dabney, a video game project called Fox and Hounds, starting the home video game. This project would evolve into the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game system launched in 1972 that was connected to the television and allowed to play several pre-recorded games.
